Thirteen Days, an outsiders fanfic

Disclaimer-

I do not own The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton or Thirteen Days by J.J. Cale.

Author's Note-

This work is un-beta'ed, therefore all mistakes are mine. Rated 'T' more for language/issues at hand rather than dirty little things. After glancing through this, I thought, "hey, there's thirteen scenes—why not tie it in?" so thus the ideas were born.

There's Birmingham, Mobile, and up to Baton Rouge
We're smokin' cigarettes and reefer, drinkin' coffee and booze
I saw the sun go down in Atlanta, come up in New Orleans
I got to know a waitress; I tried to get in her jeans

Tim Shepard has a gun.

It's a small black revolver, a cheap .45 he'd pawned off from some crazy-ass speed dealer last summer in Oklahoma City. The glock spends more time in between the shelves of his dresser drawers rather than molding itself into his hands, but he can't complain because he's a gang leader and he owns a gun (illegally, of course) and it's not like you can go around town showing off your most prized possession, anyway.

He's not quite sure about what he's going to do with it just yet, but when the time comes, he'll know what bastard's face to point the barrel at and what finger should be used to pull the trigger.

One day when he's running around the house looking for his shoes, Curly finds the gun. Why his shoes, however, would be hidden between the shelves of the dresser drawers in their bedroom, Tim has absolutely no fucking idea.

Tim sees the gun in Curly's hands and swears a blue streak, grabs it and then cuffs him over the head with the metallic grip. He empties the four bullets out of the cylinder and dumps them into his jeans pocket before Curly can start asking questions that Tim can't answer.

By the end of the summer, Curly has long forgotten about the gun and moved onto his next obsession—Ana Maria DeJesus—but Tim hasn't because he remembers everything.

During a harsh reevaluation in the Tulsa County Police Department holding cell, which reeks of piss and blood and vomit, he decides that hiding the gun between the shelves of the dresser drawers isn't exactly the best place (especially if the fuzz decide to pull a search-and-seizure-warrant on him in the near future) so after he's let out on bail the first thing he does is go home and store the gun in the glove compartment of his Charger.

And, for awhile, it stays there, until one night a drunken Tim lets a sober Dallas Winston take his car for a joyride down The Ribbon.

He's woken up roughly the next morning by the sound of his car's engine churning alongside the curb in front of the house. Groggy, he stumbles over Curly's body on the way downstairs—stupid shit had passed out on the stairs, again—and is out the front door and into the bright sunlight of a late-August morning a few minutes later.

"What the fuck do you want, Dallas?" he yells from the porch, leaning his body against the wood railing. It's barely nine o'clock—too early to be playing these games in the middle of the desert.

Dallas rolls the window down and pokes his blonde head out, grinning like a mad man who'd just been on a killing spree.

"Never told me you owned a glock, Tim." Dallas says all of this through cigarette smoke, a cloud of gray circling around his head. He drops an arm out the window, specks of metal sparkling between the crevasses of his clenched hand. "Illegal possession of a gun . . . Sounds like one a them felonies to me, don'tcha think?"

Tim curls his fingernails into his palms so he won't charge across the dirt in his boxers and risk losing the rest of a shattered reputation he has left. Bites on the inside of his cheek, counts his teeth with his tongue—one two three four fix six seven eight—watches Dallas like a predator stalks its prey. Always there, so close yet a thousand miles away.

"Give it back." He knows better than to entice the kid—it fucks him out of his skull.

Dallas draws his arm back into the car. Places the gun on the dashboard, his fingers melting into the steering wheel, small eyes—sharp blue chips of ice—all the while never leaving Tim's. "What if I don't?"

"Give it back, Dallas."

The car engine—his car engine, goddamn it—revs once again, crackling trickles of rubber against asphalt breaking through the whoosh, whoosh of blood pounding in his ears. Tim steps backwards, draws a deep breath in. Focuses on how the yellow rays of a morning sun tears its messy path across the charcoal skyline. He won't lose it, he tells himself. He won't lose it no matter how fucking hot the blood under his skin boils and no matter how much his fingers itch to pound into Dallas' face . . .

Tires squealing like pigs and Dallas' laugh drown out the silent scream Tim forces himself to swallow back down. He stalks back inside the house; makes sure to shut the door quietly, watches a half-dazed Curly jump up from his place on the stairs at the sudden burst of noise and roll down the thirteen steps, landing at his brother's feet.

Tim smirks, nudges Curly with a toe. Stupid fucking kid.

On September 11th, 1963, Dallas gets released from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary on what he describes to Tim as "good behavior" over a long-awaited lunch consisting of Tim's fries and his half-eaten cheeseburger at The Dingo.

Dallas is nearly bouncing out of his seat: a dangerous combination of too-much testosterone and not enough nicotine. He dips a fry into the pile of ketchup, tells Tim that Sylvia wrote him letters while he was in the cooler 'bout "how she fuckin' cheated on me with some punk-ass kid who I'd really like to give a beatin' to right about now"—the kind of punk-ass kid Tim knows only too well. Himself.

(So when Tim finds out from Curly on Saturday night that Dallas Winston slashed his motherfucking tires, Tim pounds the shit out of Dallas until the bastard drops to his knees. In the end, Tim's vision is painted red, knuckles split wide-open and head swimming while Dallas throws up his stomach onto his tee-shirt because he can't sit up and his ribs are on the edge of slicing through his heart.

Tim laughs.

It hurts to breathe, but neither of them will admit to defeat even if it kills one and leaves the other broken. Because, after all, when the levee breaks, isn't that what friends are for?)

Tim's opened the car door of Paco DeJesus' borrowed Ford and is about to climb in when he sees Dallas poking around the edge of the house.

The blonde emerges from the shadows and slams the open door shut. Exasperated, Tim turns on his heel, raises a fist just in case. If his mouth wasn't closed and he wasn't breathing through his nose, he would've upchucked his dinner onto his shoes and died of suffocation.

"I know who did it, Tim."

Tim bangs his fist on the hood of the car. "Like fucking hell you do."

"Seriously. Lemme borrow it—"

There is a rumble sometime this week, Tim vaguely remembers. No weapons—heaters, chains, bottles. "Learn to play by the rules, Dallas," is all he says, because his own goddamned brother sure doesn't know how to. He storms back across the lawn and gets one hand on the doorknob before he's cornered in between one of the columns and the tattered screen.

"Goddamnit, just lemme borrow the fucking gun, would you?" Dallas is so close to Tim that he can smell an overwhelming mixture of sex and cigarettes and that disgusting perfume Sylvia's always dousing herself in.

"Fine," Tim growls. He digs out the cheap .45 from his waistband, hands the unloaded revolver over to Dallas' expectant fingers. There is a moment of silence as Dallas puzzles over the fact that, for some reason, the gun isn't loaded.

He sneers, "I'll need the bullets, too, shithead."

Tim rolls his eyes. "You can't just go off on a killing rampage when you don't even own a firearm under your name, Dal. I'm pretty sure that falls under the category illegal."

A sadistic smile crosses Dallas' face, pinching the corners of his eyes and tightening his frown lines, the porch light reflecting gold off his canine-like teeth. "Oh, yes, you can." Then he shoves the gun into his jacket pocket, flicks Tim off and lopes down the porch steps into the awaiting night.

Days pass before Dallas steals Buck Merril's T-Bird and drives to Windrixvillle. He drags a terrible-bleached Ponyboy and no-more-hair-in-front-of-his-eyes Johnny out of the abandoned church to the nearest Dairy Queen.

The two boys binge on cheeseburgers and sundaes and fries while Dallas leans back against the red-leather material of the car seat, chewing on the edge of his ID card. When they're finally done wolfing down the grease, Dallas smirks and says, "The little red-head—what's her name?—told us that them Socs ain't gonna fight with no weapons less we use any."

Ponyboy nearly shits his pants. "Cherry?" he squeaks.

"I don't frickin' keep tabs on the people I don't want to remember, alright?" Dallas says indignantly. "Your dye-job is a joke, Ponyboy. I feel mighty sorry for those broads who keep lookin' at you sideways."

"Quit it, Dally," Ponyboy whines, running a hand through his hair self-consciously. He turns to Johnny. "Is it that bad?" he asks.

Johnny shakes his head. "No," he murmurs, "'S'all right."

Dallas cuts their voices off by raising his sunglasses up to his forehead. "You two gotta lot to learn." He slips the key back in the ignition and turns it to the right, the T-Bird's engine roaring—a kind of deafening pound—as they peel out of the parking lot and back towards solitude.

Fire.

The church is on fire.

Somewhere, amongst all the green grass and blue sky and gray smoke, Ponyboy and Johnny are racing towards the collapsing structure against Dallas' yells from the T-Bird's window to "what the fuck are you doing? Get back here!". Inside the hot ball of flames they find the last thing on earth they thought would be there—kids—and begin to toss them out the window one by one.

Face wet from perspiration, mouth burning, Johnny grabs for the nearest girl's sticky fingers and throws her at Ponyboy. Gasps for a taste of air, doesn't know where to go—everything is black besides the light, a burning pitch of orange amongst the ashes.

A thundering crack of the roof beginning to collapse echoes above him and the ground beneath him vibrates, the kind of sound a bone makes when it snaps in half, ripping Johnny out of his reverie. He spins around, vision blurred from the heavy smoke, realizes that Ponyboy is long gone and so is his chance of getting out of here alive.

Panic climbs up his throat.

The jean jacket burns—

Dallas catches the denim collar between two desperate fingers and pulls.

The yellow sun flies—

He runs faster than he's ever run before (but even then, it still isn't fast enough) because Johnny is screaming and it's all Dallas can hear as they stumble out from beneath the rubble and into the blinding white chaos of little kids crying and teachers wailing and Ponyboy passed out cold on the ground.

The blue sky swims—

It's his entire fault, the reason why Johnny is stillscreaming like Bloody fucking Mary as his twisted, burnt body is loaded onto a stretcher and he can't help but be the sick bastard he is and watch.

The green grass rolls—

An EMT pokes him in the arm, the one that isn't charcoaled ash, and asks if he would "please get in the ambulance, sir" though he refuses. Once he turns his back away, tears his narrowed eyes from Johnny's wide ones, once he tries to breathe, he will know that he failed.

So Dallas does the only thing he knows how to: he fights back.

On Thursday night Curly calls from the reformatory to complain about how his roommate, Tony, is a wackjob, but most of the time he's "a pretty cool guy"; how the food "fucking sucks" and "I swear to God, no one can cook like Angel, Tim", to which Tim nods his head in response and forgets, for a split-second, that his brother isn't in the other room but what seems like an entire universe away.

So Tim does what he does best: ends a conversation that never started—really, he barely got a word in—and hastily tells Curly that he'll stop by Oklahoma City for a visit next weekend, because the rumble's Saturday night and he'll be in a hangover-coma for three days, and besides, it's "nothing to fucking worry about" because he ain't a kid no more and he knows how to take care of himself.

(He leaves out the part about how Ponyboy Curtis and Dallas' little Tag-along killed a Soc and escaped to some Bumblefuck town and lit a church on fire. And how, right now, Tag-along is rotting away in a hospital bed, Ponyboy Curtis is on the verge of what looks to Tim like suicide, and how Dallas has been avoiding him for the past one-hundred-and-forty-four hours—roughly six days, if you want to get technical.)

For the rest of the night the dial tone will ring in his ears.

10.

"You've been avoidin' me, Winston."

Tim leans against the doorframe on what is an early Saturday morning but feels like a lazy Sunday afternoon, waiting for an answer. Hospitals have always given him the Willies: he figures that the less time he spends inside one of those claustrophobic, white sterilized rooms the better.

Dallas rolls onto his side, his back facing Tim. "Go fuck your mother in the ass, Shepard," he grunts into his pillow.

Tim frowns deeply, gripping the corner of the newspaper folded under his arm until the tips of his fingers turn stark-white and he can't move his hand, until he knows that the ache in his chest of being fast but never fast enough will not explode. His fingertips buzz with electricity.

He feels antsy. He wants to hit something. He wants to hit Dallas.

When Dallas realizes that Tim isn't going to go home anytime soon, he sits up a little bit, purses his lips and spits, "What?"

"You gotta whole article written 'bout you in the paper—take a look." Tim tosses the TULSA TIMES across the room halfheartedly and misses Dallas' fingers by a couple of inches, floating down to land on the floor in a pile of black ink and crisp paper.

Ice eyes narrow. "What the fuck are you talking about, Shepard?"

Tim points to the floor, where, spread out across the front page is the title: LOCAL BOYS SAVE CHILDREN FROM CHURCH FIRE EARLY THURSDAY MORNING. "I was surprised it ain't said 'DEAD OR ALIVE' under your ugly mug."

Now it's Dallas' turn to frown. "So what?"

"'So what' what?"

"Never mind."

Tim shoves his hands deep into his jacket pockets, running a finger along the orange Zippo lighter edge as Dallas turns his head to look out the window, jaw set and brow furrowed. "You can leave me the fuck alone now," is all he growls, and Tim wonders why the birds squawking out their lungs on the electrical wire are so interesting all of the sudden.

On his way out, Tim stops by the ICU and pokes his head into one of the rooms, where a badly burnt boy is laying stomach-down on a flimsy mattress—he doesn't pay attention to anything else, all the wires and metal are enough to make him swallow back down the words stuck in his throat.

The nurse in the room turns at the sound of boot heels by the door and raises her eyes from the stack of papers in her arms. "Visitation hours are over," she says, "You're too late."

Fifteen minutes later, Tim pulls the Charger over to an abandoned strip of desert alongside the road. He opens the car door and throws up.

11.

The first time Tim gets hit, all of the air wheezes out of his lungs in one big gulp and it burns.

The low blow to his stomach sends Tim's body to the dry grass, nose suddenly smearing with a rock on impact. Somewhere, off in another world, his nose is broken, although in this one, it's all about the here and the now and the winning.

Another kick to the ribs and this time he goes rolling, barely managing to scramble up onto his own feet before he is taken down by another pair of ruthless fists once again. Sending a punch right into the Soc's chest with enough force to send the already-unstable boy reeling backwards a few more yards, Tim watches from the corner of his eye as a torrent of bleach-blonde hair rustles through the pile of bodies, dragging what looks like little Ponyboy Curtis behind him.

Scowling, he cracks his knuckles a few times in disappointment and draws a hand over his face. What the hell does Winston think he's doing? From across the blood-covered lot, he barely hears Keith Mathews declare in a voice too earnest, too real he smiles. Almost.

"They're runnin'! The fuckers are runnin'! We won!"

Copper lathers itself onto his tongue and he spits blood out onto his shoes. By the time he finally manages to gather his shit together, the field is almost vacant besides the remaining members of his gang, who are all either pathetically lying on the ground like the shits they are or kneeling beside Paco DeJesus' busted-up face.

Tim covers his mouth with a hand and sighs into his fingers. It is going to be a long, long night.

12.

Dead,

dead,

Dead (the body on the bed—Johnny's—doesn't move, his mouth is open though no words come out, haven't for awhile too long).

Dead (desperate fingers—the same five that pulled him from the flames barely seventy-two hours ago; taught him how to light his first cigarette when they were just kids on top of the world; gripped his jaw too tightly to examine the strangulation marks as they poked and prodded various cuts and bruises marks left by a man who never deserved to breathe under the crappy fluorescent lighting of his bathroom at the roadhouse—itch and crush through the cheap plaster of the wall).

Dead (footfalls pounding on the tile floor and down the stairs and onto the asphalt street and then he's running, and oh, God, he can't breathe; everything is painted red as he races through the blackness—the night stars above his head, snarled together in some twisted version of the horizontal tango, the sharp blades of grass and the harsh bite of asphalt digging into the skin of his heels as he races towards the inevitable).

Dead (the screams from sore throats of people he used to know, a constant reminder that, once again, he had lost, echoing in his ears and the stretching threads of his brain as the sirens rush on, closer, closer, closer).

Dead (the handle of the cheap .45 squeezed between ten clammy fingers, cold and heavy and ultimate as he raises the gun, teeth chattering and mind swimming and tears choking his tongue because he lost he lost he motherfucking lost but tonight he's won a little piece of this earth, his fucked up fifteen minutes of fame beneath a streetlight).

Dead (shots ring out across the hill, pop pop pop pop pop, a dizzying burst of white noise that leaves him almost breathless and only when the first bullet has lodged itself into the lower-left chamber of his heart does Dallas Winston let himself fall).

13.

Like everything else, it starts as just a game—a game of forgetting so he won't be able to feel his blood run burning-red and his fingernails digging through scarred palms, looking for a fraction of some sense of belonging that isn't there and never really was. Though, deep down, he's sick of playing these head games, has been for too long of awhile now—he's done, it is somebody else's fucking turn.

Above them, the OPEN sign glows all neon oranges and fluorescent pinks, highlighting the darkest shadows pressed into the cold, cold night. It's a Friday night in October: he's on the edge of the wooden steps, on the edge of his mind, on the edge of the world. She watches him like a hawk—she's always fucking watching with bloodshot eyes and raised eyebrows—and his insides squirm.

He's never been that much of a drinker, but when she finally rests her forehead on his shoulder and cries her eyes out at two a.m., his name choked out between sobs—"Tim Tim Tim Tim Tim Oh God Tim"—he thinks he'll drink down the whole bar.

(As soon as the cartilage in his nose is healed Tim Shepard runs like hell.)

Yeah, we been to New Orleans, we been to New York
Some take to the magazines, some take to dope
Sometimes we make money, sometimes I don't know
Thirteen days with five to go